Song Lyric of the Day (Sarah McLachlan, on the ‘Deep and Endless Night’ Before Life)

“Once there was a darkness

Deep and endless night
You gave me everything you had, oh, you gave me life.”— Sarah McLachlan, Séamus Egan and Dave Merenda, “I Will Remember You,” sung by McLachlan from The Brothers McMullen: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1995)

The lyrics of “I Will Remember You” reflect, in an often literal way, their first notable context: The Brothers McMullen, a comedy-drama by novice writer-director-actor hyphenate Edward Burns in which a trio of Irish-American brothers sort out their current relationships even as they are haunted by family and cultural history.

But particularly after 9/11, the song grew into something far larger: a hushed goodbye to the dead, replayed repeatedly (helped undoubtedly as much by McLachlan’s angelic vocal as by the hymnlike melody) at funerals and other memorial services for that first great American tragedy of the 21^st century.

These days, these lyrics are reverberating far more insistently around America. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon claimed just short of 3,000 lives, but the toll so far from COVID-19 in the United States alone is already nearly 100 times that amount.

The narrator of “I Will Remember You” sings of gratitude to a lover for bringing life after “deep and endless night.” Americans are in the midst of a desolation more engulfing than one individual’s private emptiness, though. Right now, as we prepare for a darker, colder season before vaccines universally distributed assure life, all we can do is obey McLachlan’s tender but weary urging: “Weep not for the memories.”